“TOTAL PROOF”: NYC Exhibition of Work by Chin and GALA Committee for TV Series through Nov. 27
Red Bull Studios, 220 W. 18th St., New York, NY, is proud to announce the first comprehensive New York presentation of the GALA Committee’s In the Name of the Place, a covert conceptual artwork deployed on the primetime television show Melrose Place from 1995-97. TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995-1997 is open to the public through November 27, 2016.
“The GALA Committee’s site specific intervention with Melrose Place is one of the most elaborate and well orchestrated collaborations in contemporary art and television history. In 1995, invited by co-curators Julie Lazar and Tom Finkelpearl to participate in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA) titled Uncommon Sense, artist Mel Chin [Prospectus works: Operation Paydirt in New England and Neurotoxic Element music video] gathered a team of artists, along with faculty and students from the University of Georgia (UGA), Athens, GA, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles, CA, and Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO, to form the GALA Committee. Realizing that a powerful site for a public artwork wasn’t necessarily a physical place, but network television, they arranged with Melrose Place producers to create artworks as props for the popular primetime soap opera. Over several seasons, the artists produced a range of conceptual artworks and objects that updated art historical movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Agitprop, commented on social and political real- ties, deepened the content of unfolding plotlines, and elevated the form and content of a ‘90s pop-culture mainstay.”
TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995-1997 exists as part archive, part film set. Red Bull Studios New York has been built out to resemble certain reoccurring sets from Melrose Place’s televised version of ‘90s Los Angeles, with the GALA Committee’s objects displayed in situ. Accompanying these works are a variety of archival documents—communiqués, sketches, and other ephemera—attesting to the vast network of communication (and collaboration) which powers televised entertainment, and the GALA Committee’s historic intervention. A sunken Melrose Place Convo Pool designed by Chin is a prime space to discuss the ramifications of “the generational transfer of ideas” developed by the work of the GALA Committee.
